Needle Phobia.
She took bites out of three nurses and kicked them robustly in the shins; she demolished an entire outpatient cubicle in a coastal community hospital, before making an impossible escape through a tiny window near the ceiling of an examination room into which she had been placed, pending a rapid therapeutic re-evaluation of the situation.
She was a robust thirteen-year old girl who had been dragged from a remote island community “to see the doctor” because of an audible wheeze.
Her wheeze increased in direct proportion to the eruption of her sudden ballistic behavior, when approached by yours truly, the unfortunate physician tasked with being the first doctor to ever attempt an examination of her chest.
Later apprehended by her mother, as the ballistic party pursued a grim determination to “Escape to Europe” by boarding a moored fishing trawler at the local dock, a puff or two of an aerosolized bronchodilator aboard the trawler, restored calm, and that child became so impressed, she went on to become a robust member of the nursing profession.
While there may not be a specific medical term for “Doctor Phobia”, there certainly is one for “Needle Phobia”.
But the impossibility of correctly connecting “Trypanophobia” to the public health implications of its scientific context, appears to have successfully spooked even the most intrepid of news-readers away from attempting to include it in their nightly bulletins, possibly on grounds of the “Fluffing Phobia” it engenders.
Most people have never heard of Trypanophobia.
However, at least 20% of people across the globe, are impacted by it, and have an unspoken phobia for needles, which ranks eighth in the pecking order of irrational fears, behind spiders, snakes, spiders again, a fear of heights, and spiders again.
Research in relation to the portion of the population who declare themselves adamantly opposed to ever receiving any of the covid-19 vaccines, appears to exactly mirror the portion of the population who are statistically known to be impacted by a needle phobia.
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As news media outlets consult with a series of medical experts, the pernicious authoritarianism which has crept into the business of denouncing vaccine hesitancy as a threat to society, threatens in its turn, to drive people with an irrational fear of needles, more underground than they ever were before.
In all likelihood, “Needle Phobia” and “Doctor Phobia” are monozygotic parts of the same phobia.
It would appear that the way to treat a phobia in a public health emergency, is to constantly denounce people with a fear of needles, into a more shameful appreciation of their irrationality.
However, when the now robust member of the nursing profession, kicked her future colleagues so vehemently in the shin, she displayed no indication of it mattering to her thirteen-year old sensibilities, where the rest of society pegged her morals.
All that mattered to the immediacy of her robust phobic reflexes, was boarding any convenient ocean-going vessel, armed with a determined ambition to “Escape to Europe” at all costs.
In non-democratic countries, where authoritarianism has no reason to sneak into the narrative by pernicious means, phobic behavior, along with any other inconvenience imparted by non-uniform parts of the human condition, are often mechanically addressed by way of the correctional facilities available at concentration camps.
However, in more democratic settings, the Western world’s vast network of Asylums has more or less been decommissioned, based in part on the realization that treating any form of difference, by the conformity-inducing mechanisms at the disposal of ouverte authoritarianism, causes a lot more harm than good, most especially at the ballot box.
And, though I would personally disagree with most of what former President Trump espouses, Twitter and Facebook’s pernicious authoritarianism is as wrong to have shut him up, as other mainstream news narratives are, in attempting to generate shame among people for whom a needle phobia represents an unimaginable and irrational fear.
Needle phobia is more than capable of mutating into the convenience of any number of sublimated right or left-wing conspiracy theories, and has equal potential to become the wind beneath the wings of multiple misinformation campaigns.
Where understanding and kindness are required, insensitivity to the genuine fear and panic experienced by people with a needle phobia, threatens to successfully empower vaccine hesitancy for the foreseeable future, because “Escaping to Europe” may not be the option it used to be, when a robust member of the nursing profession bit and kicked her way to discovering her vocation in life.
